Monday, September 23, 2013

Couch to 10k: Week 11, session 1

Oh my gods this felt AWFUL. So awful I decided I hated running and if I wasn't asking for sponsorship I'd give it all up now.

Blah.

I'm not going to give it up don't worry.

So what went wrong?
I had to keep stopping to cross roads, either waiting for a gap in the traffic or for the lights to turn. This broke up my ryhythm and made me feel like I was walking or standing around for ages.
I fell over. I was running on a grass verge and rather comically went splat straight forward onto my front. I did not get hurt, just was a bit sore.
I wasn't familiar with the route I was doing and that always makes things feel harder. Plus the road I was on seemed to go on forever and ever and ever.
At the 30 minute mark I had to stop and walk for a couple of minutes because it was too damn hard.
The one minute walk between the 40 minute round and the 20 minute round turned into a 2 minute walk.
On the 20 minute stretch I was running through town and pedestrians were getting in the way so I ahd to slow down and walk.
It just felt really, really hard.

I didn't even attempt Gas Hill again. Running up that just wasn't going to happen today.

But then when I finished I looked at my endomondo app and I'd run (more of less) for 6.2 miles... which is 10k... I could have sworn I'd only done 5 or 5.5 miles... Let me explain about how I record my running..:

I go out with two devices on me. One is my casio wristwatch. I use the stopwatch in it to time when to run and when to walk. So when I leave the house I start the 5 minute warm up walk and at the 5 minute mark I start running. For today's session, I would then keep running until 45 minutes, then I would walk for 1 minute, then I would run until the stopwatch says 66 minutes. Then I do the cool down walk for a further 5 minutes.
When I have to stop to cross roads I stop the stopwatch and start it again when I'm over and am able to run again. If I have to have a walking break in the middle of a running round I stop the stopwatch whilst I walk and start it again when I run. This means that no matter the amount of roads I cross, pauses I take or walking breaks I do, I know that run for the full amount of time in the the programme. So today I ran for 60 minutes.

The second device that I use is the Endomondo app on my phone. I start this either as soon as I leave the house, and stop it when I get home, or (like today) I start it after the warm up when I start running and stop it when I stop running, before the cool down.

So today I can see that although I was running for 60 minutes, I was out for 1 hour 10 minutes and I did 6.2 miles. I estimate that with the falling over and hanging around waiting to cross roads, I was standing still for about 5 minutes so was walking for about 5 minutes. According to the training plan I should have been walking for just one minute. So OK, I didn;'t run for 6.2 miles, but I was covered that distance and I was running for the vast majority of that time. This makes me feel a lot better. The run may have felt awful, but I did what I needed to do.

The app says my average speed was 5.29 mph. Now, when I was at the gym last week the treadmill was set at between 8km/hour and 9km/hour. Sadly the treadmill doesn't show miles.. Now 9km/hour equates to 5.59miles/hour. As I was running today it felt like I was going really slowly, much slower than I was on the treadmill. I only really felt like I was doing a decent pace in the full 5 minutes before I fell over. After that it felt really slow. So I am very surprised by endomondo's average speed. I must ahve been going faster than 5.29miles/hour when running, because the average has to incorporate the walking parts.

I guess this is a lesson that although I may feel awful about a run I may actually be doing OK on it.

Money raised:
£189. That's £36 that I have personally donated
and £153 from friends, family and anonymous sponsors. Reclamation of
gift aid has raised another £38.25, bringing the total to £225.25.
My target is £200 (without gift aid) Please help me get there by donating on this website!